Digital glitch effects

Dstrukt's Chris James Hewitt believes third-party plug-ins can change the way you work in Photoshop forever. Here he reveals a great way to create realistic glitch effects to roughen-up your moving image work.

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When making animations for your video projects in 3D packages do you ever find that everything starts to look a little too clean? The current vogue for an all-digital workflow means perfect fidelity throughout the process, but sometimes you need to roughen things up a bit.

Analogue technologies, such as cine film and VHS video, had inherent flaws. Film has a grain and video creates distortion, but everyone loves a little bit of glitch - from directors such as Chris Cunningham to musicians like Telefon Tel Aviv, Chris Clark and Autechre. I also have an unearthly love for anything distorted or broken. I have no idea where this love comes from, and why when I hear and see static the hairs on the back of my neck stand to attention.

In this tutorial I'll show you how to tweak your footage to give it a grungy feel. You'll do this by adding camera shake and flicker, before tinting and grading the footage to give a bit more impact. This tutorial is all about using plug-ins to your advantage - including Boris Continuum 3, Essential Effects and Tinderbox 3. Not only will your workflow become much faster, but you might find this opens you up to a different way of thinking when it comes to your 'post' work in After Effects. It's all about making plug-ins do the hard work for you...